Better plastic guns can be built from blocks of plastic and hand tools then can be built using 3D printers. Why are they not freaking out about that. All these laws do is trip up good people exploring the capabilities of new technology. They do not address the issue of people wanting to use guns on others. We need to be addressing the issue of hate not method of gun construction.

All this scary doom and gloom talk about the end of the world due to antibiotic resistance. Its the same old story, somebody sees a problem they assume static conditions (ie no new antibiotics will be developed) against escalating problem (microbes are developing resistance to antibiotics) and presto draw the conclusion that we are all doomed. Has not happened will not happen. Recent research shows many new antibiotics are beginning to come out of the lab that directly attack the most drug resistant strains. The method used to develop them is amazingly targeted so they will be like the fabled magic bullet that kills just the bad germs. They are not broad spectrum however they do not need to be. Too much talk about restricting use of current antibiotics to maintain their effectiveness. Bad policy. We should instead work on creating great tools for identifying causative agents virus vs bacteria and type quickly so we know what to use when. It would save money and improve peoples health. Now its oh you have an infection here's some pills. If you don't get better call me. Instead it should be here let me take a sample and put it in the Germ Ident 1000. Ah here is shows you have virus 2187 no antibiotic needed. Just take this decongestant, fever reducer and anti nausea pills stay home for 4 days and you will be fine.

I do not understand this hysteria over 3d Printers and Guns. You can make a plastic gun using other tools too like a drill press, milling machine and lathe. The quality of guns built that way would be much much higher than 3D printed guns. With a little effort someone could use modeling clay silicon rubber and polyester resin to make a plastic gun. If you added some fiber reinforcing it would probably hold up very well. Much better than 3Dprinted guns.

If we could just figure out how to execute murderers humanely using imported water, beer and wine we could fix our balance of trade without any tariffs. http://pierstransportation.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/top-u-s-imports-exports-with-europe/ Car parts would work too but its hard to figure out how we could do that humanely.

The rate of type 1 is 0.4% so to get 100 cases they would need to study 25,000 people double that for a control group. The disease is most often discovered in children so they would need to be followed for say 15 years. So 700,000,000 / 50,000 / 15 = 933 euros per person per year for the study. That still sounds like a lot. Each participant would need a checkup once a year to see if they have developed the disease or got anything else that might show up in abnormal levels after the vaccine. Considering the socialized medicine in Europe the cost of checkups is already covered most of the study cost would be collecting and evaluating data.

Part of the problem with the first model was the awful advertising. People dancing around throwing their surface computer around clicking it told you nothing about the product and looked very silly. Who would want to be associated with that. The new advertising actually makes the surface look kinda cool. Has some neat features like a usb port and the keyboard. I might actually go take a look at one.

It was potential for profit that drove the exploration of the new world. The risk of death and failure were just as large for those explorers. There technology was barely able to handle the trip and the process of extracting the required resources to maintain life and obtain a profit. Space is vastly more difficult however our technology is becoming capable of conquering it. Many people risked all their wealth and life on opening up the new world. After the initial voyages it took about 100 years. That time frame looks very likely to repeat itself for the conquest of space. Initial voyages into space started in the 1940s. Man took some trips in the 60s and then set up a permanent outpost in near space. Government did the heavy lifting. Now its time for the commercial interests to take over. Elon Musk has already bet his company Space X once on a do or die launch. The company was nearly out of money and would have folded if the launch was not successful. Space X has passed their crisis and is moving ahead. There are others that are following. If they succeed or fail as individuals no one can know. As a group they will keep trying making that big bet to get the big payoff. That's what entrepreneurs and explorers do,

I agree things are getting better all over the world. For a great visual presentation check out the TED talk by Hans Rosling: The best stats you've ever seen http://www.ted.com/playlists/56/making_sense_of_too_much_data.html . After watching this there is not much the doom and gloomers can say that will cause me to believe things are getting worse. Yes we have problems and things are not always fair, sometimes there are setbacks however the world is becoming a better place all around.

The Microsoft tablet might be great however I never learned anything about it from the TV adds. The adds showed people dancing and throwing the devices around. I'm sorry nobody I know does that with high cost electronic devices. I could not identify with those people who were acting very weird. Why not show someone using the thing in a way that shows off a cool innovative feature of the device. Say the click on keyboard. Show some one with an Ipad having trouble typing and then the ease of using the keyboard. Unless of course the keyboard sucks. If it is better in some way than the other products out there demo the better. If not why did Microsoft bother building it in the first place?

Essentially the constitution means nothing if they say the magic words "National Security". You think you have rights sorry we think you are a threat to "National Security" we can lock you up. No evidence. No judge. No jury. No Press. No rules apply to us we are protecting "National Security". This is the same logic every dictatorship has used throughout history. How big a threat is Al Qaeda and the Talaban really? In all their attacks on the US through out all history they have killed 4400+/- people. And 4488+/- of our troops in their country. So less than 10,000 US deaths due to Al Qaeda and the Talaban over the last 17 years give or take depending on when you say Al Qaeda formed. So the average death tole is 588 US citizens per year due to Al Qaeda and the Talaban actions. How does this compare to other threats to "National Security" From the CDC Report on death statics http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04.pdf This ranks right up there with accidental deaths from firearms and a bad case of the flu. Don't get me wrong. I believe those responsible for acts of violence should be punished and a military response to 911 was the right thing to do. When you look at the actual impact based on the death toll the security of our country was not and has never been at stake. I do not feel less fearful today or more free today. I am much more fearful of loosing my rights and freedoms to actions of our government than I am to those of Al Qaeda, the Talaban and terrorism in general.

My guess is your eyes hurt because you suppress blinking while looking at the computer screen. When people watch things interesting they do not blink as much. Your eyes dry out and they hurt. Your eyes cannot physically respond to fast blinking. Its called persistence of vision. Once the blink rate exceeds that there is no physiological response. If you think there is you are fooling yourself. I once had a guy who said he could hear a 20 khz signal in a drive motor circuit. I would turn on the power and He would grab his ears. Problem was is that the power supply was unplugged. Either he was trying to fool me or he was fooling himself. What you should do is set up an experiment. Set up a pair of computer controlled LEDs to flicker at different rates then guess which flickers faster. Have the computer randomly change the rate and which one is faster. Then see at what flicker rate the error rate goes to zero. That is when you can actually see the flicker.

Thats a lot of dollars to burn. What did they spend it on? Thats way more then Tesla spent to get their car into production.

Unfortunately many features that can be destructive or super useful have very bad descriptions of what they do and how it will affect usability of the system. Most users will make good decisions when they know whats at stake. So instead of the are you sure? How about a couple of paragraphs or a whole page describing what the function does, when you should use it and when you should not use it. In other words you are trying to fix a corrupted index file and there is a function that wipes out the file and builds a new one. That might be fine on a small data base that will only take a short while to rebuild but a disaster for a large one that could take days to rebuild. You are the programmer you are in the best position to explain what a function will do, Why someone would need to use the function and what bad effects will happen if they use it when they should not. Like wise if your program starts a bunch of services and processes give the users a clue about what they are for. Its very frustrating when you have many many services and processes running and you are trying to track down a problem. You have traced it to a process but no clue where it came from and what it does. Anyone selling software should be required to have a website with a database of all the processes and services their program uses and a detailed description of what each one does and known incompatibilities. It would save so much time.

They need a Magician on the team analyzing this not just scientists. Scientists are not trained in detecting FRAUD. All of the very strange requirements for the test. Such as requiring it to be done in their lab. Proprietary wave forms. Limited operating time, Secret formulas seem very suspicious to me. Those are exactly the kinds of things you need in order to perpetrate a fraud.

This spooky action at a distance thing is hogwash. All the data points to random persistent polarization. Once a pair of entangled photons are produced they each have a definite polarization that persists over time and space unless you do something to it. That is Newtonian. A body in motion remains in motion until acted upon by an external force. A photon polarized at an orientation remains in that orientation until acted upon by an external force that changes the orientation. Creating a new photon polarized the same as an existing photon is not spooky.Hard to do and maybe very useful but not spooky. The Bell experiment / theory has been badly abused and interpreted in an odd way. Its results show conclusively that once photons are created in an entangled way the polarization of the individual photons remains aligned between those two photons. It proves that the unassigned BS is BS. The polarization is a definite fixed value and stays that way until you do something to the photon to change it. Saying its polarization is all orientations until the wave function collapses is not accurate. One photon has one polarization. We do not know what it is until we measure it. Because we do not know what it is does not mean its polarization is undefined. Undefined Unknown. The population of photons have a random range of polarization. But each entangled pair have a matched polarization.